Those are all reasonable and excellent names JefBT. I meant when you name things after the cartographers vast overhead view, such as a two hundred mile long lake that is shaped like an eagle so you call it eagle lake even though its very doubtful the people living on it (unless they carefully mapped it) would have any idea that its shape would in any way resemble an eagle.
I am the only one to think that this could be a good idea for a challenge?
People in the past know that they are in the past and will go out of their way to make their maps look "old". A map 500 years in the past looks 500 years old even when it is brand new. However, people in the past also always have data as good as modern maps and always fill the entirety of the extent of their maps with perfectly precise, to scale, information just like modern maps. Likewise people in the future make maps that use OCR fonts (or at the very least will NEVER use serif fonts) with light on dark (preferably the light is glowing blue) and triangular or hexagonal patterns for no reason other than to demonstrate that the map was made in the future.
Every map must have a compass rose no matter how inappropriate it is.
Ditto linear scale bars.
The funny lines on maps are purely decorations to make it look "mappy".
The more stuff on a map the better. (Real cartographers fall prey to this one too)
Alphanumeric locator grids on maps that aren't modern street maps.
how can a map be 500 hundred years in the past if it's brand new? haha
but yeah, those are some good points
"My lord, the guild of cartographers have prepared this new map of your realm. They have carefully aged it to make appear to be 500 years old, just in case any time travellers from the present, 500 years from now, should happen to see it. We wouldn't want them to get confused and not realize that they are in the past."Originally Posted by NedS298
I don't understand, I'm sorry.
The "making it look old" thing transcends cartography though and is particularly prevalent in things like cinema, video games, and stuff. Buildings, statues, and everything else will all be weathered or worn and neglected, rather than painted, plastered and lived in. The timber is never freshly cut, clothing often looks like it hasn't been washed for weeks, and parchment and vellum looks like it was made centuries ago. Of course there will be danish landrace pigs and holstein cattle in the pens and fields - we can't use unrecognizable breeds! =P
On a side note - I did do the hexagon thing on one of my sci-fi-ish maps. But I like hexagons and honeycomb patterns. So I'll do it again!
I don't think that making things look old is silly in general. But in cartography it's different because the map needs to be as good as possible and aging it will only make it less useful. A useless map is usually useless unless it's for artistic purposes.
I saw that a large number of maps tend to have torsions in them like if they were rotating or as if the mapper used a distorted map projection.
Or maybe they just use projections like this one : Lambert azimuthal equal-area projection - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Last edited by Azélor; 04-12-2014 at 10:40 AM.
I believe that the world of Dragonlance (I honestly can't remember the name) is in the southern hemisphere. I'm not 100% on that though.
More on subject, I agree. It does seem as if all continental maps are north = cold, south = warm. I believe that this stems from the fact that Europe (which is what most stereotypical settings are based upon) is in the northern hemisphere.
That is correct Beomir, the world is called Krynn, and most of it is in the southern hemisphere.
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